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Dynamical modelling and control of space tethers: a review of space tether research

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Abstract

The literature review manuscript focuses mainly on five topics, which are related to the space tether control researches: (1) space tether dynamical modelling; (2) tether deployment and retrieval; (3) trajectory generation and control; (4) tether attitude and motion control; (5) tether vibration control and dynamical simulations. With the basic aim of establishing useful sources of fundamental researches in the literature, and high-lighting the previous control methods developed, this paper attempts to provide a contextualised source of references for the further space tether dynamics and control studies.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the partial supports provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51105061, 61179059, 51305068 and 51275077), the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry (No. 201294001) and the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORSAS) awarded by the University of Glasgow and the scholarship awarded by the Faculty of Engineering, University of Glasgow. Also, the authors would like to acknowledge two anonymous reviewers with their valuable comments for this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Built Environment, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, G4 0BA, UK

    Yi Chen

  2. School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, China

    Rui Huang

  3. School of Mechanical, Electronic and Industrial Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, China

    Liping He & Xianlin Ren

  4. Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing, 401120, China

    Bin Zheng

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  1. Yi Chen
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  2. Rui Huang
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  3. Liping He
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  4. Xianlin Ren
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  5. Bin Zheng
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Correspondence to Yi Chen or Bin Zheng.

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Chen, Y., Huang, R., He, L. et al. Dynamical modelling and control of space tethers: a review of space tether research. Nonlinear Dyn 77, 1077–1099 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-014-1390-5

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